Today’s post picks up where we left off, sharing the powerful and beautiful poetry of people’s varying resistances to annihilation. From the USA to Palestine, from Hawaii to Guatemala, these poems show us the common humanity we possess, though desperate efforts are being made to strip our commonalities away. These efforts are evident in trade…
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Breaking the Silence: 5 Years of Eartotheground!
I have not been able to muster up the necessary energy, inspiration or even concentration over the last couple of months to work on this blog. And although I have continued to keep up with the horrific news of Gaza, the world’s complicity and indifference have been soul -wrenching. The trite banality of doubling down…
Going Up the Mountain!
Ya Taleen, performed by Dana Salah An old song from the Galilee, it’s believed that Palestinian women used to sing it as they visited their loved ones in prison. Through the seemingly confusing lyrics, the women would convey subversive messages, perhaps informing their loved ones that they would soon be liberated by freedom fighters. This…
Poetry for the Peeps! A Litany of Refusals to Become Ghostly!
We had the honour of supporting the students in response to their encampment for disclosure and divestment from Israel at Universities across the U.S, Canada, and internationally. This blog is dedicated to the young people who show us that conscience and compassion are still bringing hope to those who wish for justice against settler colonialism…
Poetry for the Peeps! Citizen Heart
Today is my father’s birthday. Since he was a poet, translator, lover of, and professor of comparative literatures, it is fitting that he should be born in World Poetry Month. The poems and visual arts today are a tribute to him (Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, 1938-2020)). The poems below would have engaged him and certainly been part…
To Wake Up Human!
Antonio Gramsci would have aptly described our times, smug and blood-thirsty as the “time of monsters”. Unbelievably, it’s been 173 days of military onslaught that has brought calamity and massacres to the Gaza Strip. The suffering seems endless. Having seen the testimonies of so many children and youth, the murders, the detritus of bombardment, it’s…
Art and Poetry Speaking to Our Hearts!
We are in the 129th day of genocide and ethnic cleansing carried out by the Israeli state with military, economic and moral backing by the U.S. , Germany, U.K. and Canada to name a few. Nicaragua has joined South Africa in a plea for ceasefire through the ICJ. People around the world continue to walk…
Poetry for the Peeps! Witnessing Genocide
Today’s blog continues to look at the atrocities being committed in Gaza and to join the world plea for a ceasefire now. There is no end to this inhumanity of pulverizing a people in real time and with the massive citizen and press presence on social media platforms, allowing us if we choose, to follow the absolute tragedy…
Poets and Artists Against Occupation
Again I share the words and art of Palestinians. In this upside down world where to call an end to slaughter is to be silenced! More eloquently than I, the poets and visual artists I have been sharing, lay out the daily costs of expulsion, occupation and hope for liberation. “Don’t stop talking about Palestine”,…
Children’s Books and my Father: A Remembrance
Culture and memory share a root, like branches of the same plant. That root is us, human beings, in our most creative and unself-conscious renditions. Once again, after the whirlwind of systemic violence and structural upheaval engineered through the COVID19 pandemic response, the time has come to honour the memory of those we love who…
Season of Verses
I haven’t been on the blog for quite a while. 2021 is proving to be a year of elusive concentration, spiralling exhaustion, sadness, and intense physical pain. I have re-acquainted myself with some drawing, although I have been reading about the state of the world and am often disturbed by what I see our little…
Late September Commemoration
I’m late this year in commemorating the anniversary of September 11, 1973. This infamous date came into being as the day that the military dictatorship of General Agusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of socialist President Salvador Allende Gossens in Santiago, Chile. Much has been written and recorded from that time and in terms…
Poetry in a Thousand Tongues! International Mother Language Day
It is International Mother Tongue Day, today, the 21st of February. It’s an important day to celebrate because imperial monopolies of language (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French) have erased so many forms of communication and Indigenous and languages. Only this month, the Mexican government recognized 68 Indigenous languages as national languages alongside Spanish. This took over…
Antidote to Grey! A Picture Gallery
The following drawings have been done over the last month. The greying days and short daylight hours contrive to make gloomier, an already difficult time under a second, though hardly stringent, lockdown. Every day has been a litany of anxiety and sadness, grief and powerlessness. Every day ordinary people triumph over extraordinary odds to grapple…
Fall Beauty
I love the myriad colours of fall. Along with early summer, there is so much variety in textures, hues, and scents. The scents of fall are unique to our Northern climate; just as tropical humidity carries the echo of over-ripe vegetation, the fall is a time of life buried beneath the insulating carpet of leaves,…
Ear to the Ground 